Brass punctuations interspersed with silences, the duller and more metallic sonorities of piano, cimbalom, percussion: Nell’s head appeared in the dark open window of the stage curtain, singing in English a poem by Samuel Beckett, Roundelay. It is about the end of the day, about sounds fading into indistinctness. A prologue that anticipates this death in weightlessness that will carry away the old young girl, dreaming of the bright day of her engagement with Nagg, where the bottom of Lake Como was so white, so clear.
Even more so than when it premiered at La Scala in Milan in November 2018, György Kurtag’s unique opera, Game over, whose French premiere is offered at the Paris Opera, has reinforced its status as a masterpiece. All the more remarkable since the Hungarian composer – 96 years old since February 19 – will have waited to be almost ninety years old to take the lyrical act. The score, announced for 2013 by its sponsor, Alexander Pereira, then in post at the Salzburg Festival, will not be delivered by Kurtag until 2018 at La Scala in Milan, of which Pereira has become superintendent. Also close to the musician since the 1980s, director Pierre Audi took over from Luc Bondy, who passed away in 2015.
At the center of the stage, a rudimentary shed with metallic reflections, whose facades will be illuminated by the lights of Urs Schönebaum, bathing scenes and monologues taken from the play of the same name by Samuel Beckett, which Kurtag, fascinated, discovered in 1957 during a stay in Paris. On the threshold, four dented characters, stranded people that life has left there. Hamm, an infantile potentate in a wheelchair, reigning supreme over his lanky, lame valet, the histrionic Clov, tyrannizing his old legless parents following a tandem accident, Nell and Nagg, who do not don’t end up dying, stuck in garbage cans.
A virtuoso, almost choreographic acting direction counterpoints the deadly despair that keeps the characters on the edge. With here and there, a few poignant details, suggesting the possibility of another world: the bloody, Christlike linen with which Hamm covers his face; the dog on wheels, a child’s toy and memory of this abandoned son, whom Clov, too handicapped, is unable to seize; the icon gestures of the hands of old lovers, haloed, like saints, by the lids of dustbins.
Precise and expressive direction
Kurtag’s music threw on the nihilism of the Irish playwright (who questions the end of man, the death of language and the disappearance of all possession) a deep humanity, carried by the nostalgia of the strings, the bursts of corrosive brass, to which are added popular echoes of waltzes, tango, and accordion sighs. Irish-Scottish Jewish ballad, elements of Hungarian folklore, Kurtag’s writing weaves a complex web of timbres and melodic, rhythmic and harmonic structures, in which are instilled, particularly in the prosody, references to French music (Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Messiaen) as well as at the Mitteleuropa of a Bartok, a Strauss or a Berg.
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